1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to improved data processing, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for displaying a graphical user interface for job output retrieval. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for displaying portions of a job output based on errors.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data processing systems are used by increasing numbers of businesses and individuals each year. These data processing systems help users to efficiently process data and information. To a large extent, the efficiency of the data processing system relies on processing various jobs to process data and information. A job is a separately executable unit of work defined by a user, and run by a computer. Operating systems such as z/OS from International Business Machines, have batch jobs written in job control language (JCL). The batch jobs are submitted to execute batches of commands. For example, jobs are often used for compiling programs and building applications. Jobs are submitted to be processed on the host by a job subsystem, such as a job entry system (JES). After processing, the job subsystem writes the job output to data sets. A user may then open the data sets to find out if the submitted job has run to completion and to determine if each step in the job submitted was run successfully.
For some of the more complex jobs, outputs in the data sets may reach hundreds of thousands lines. As a result, retrieving and viewing the full data set output may be undesirable because the time to open such a large file would be substantial. Additionally, the time it takes for a user to scan the large volume text file and locate the error(s) in the output data is proportional to the size of the output. In other words, the larger the output file, the longer it will take for a user to find the desired information.
Most users are interested in examining the job output when the job did not run to completion or if the job ran to completion but incurred errors or warnings during the process. In both cases, the “troubleshooting” information useful to the user is only a very small subset of the overall output data set. Most job management tools allow a user to specify the portion of the job output to retrieve. Additionally, the user may also specify the lines of the output to view by typing a locate command. Such a command displays the output from the specified line to the end of the output or lines in a range.
While both of these approaches provide the user a mechanism to reduce the size of the output, both lack any support to help the user determine what line number to enter. Such job management tools are only effective if the lines in which the errors are displayed are always the same and/or the user is an experienced user with the submitted job and has sufficient familiarity to anticipate which line(s) the error(s) appear on.
As a result, most of the time the job management tool does not effectively help the user troubleshoot the job. Because a job can have multiple steps and each step can be of variable length, the locations of errors can vary from job to job. As a result, the location of the error in the output data set is quite unpredictable. While expertise and familiarity with the jobs can help a user better anticipate where the errors might be, guessing the location of the errors is typically error prone, especially for users with limited experience.